Why guard against laissez faire copywriting?

Laissez faire copywriting means walking into a meeting of your company`s board of directors and speaking nonsense. It is constructing the most elaborate and eye-catching billboard on the busiest highway in your country, and making a spelling a mistake. It is giving your sales pitch to a person who does not know you company intimately and does not have experience in selling it, and then leaving her alone to guess. It`s playing golf in the dark. With black balls.

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Too many high profile clients nowadays request copy to make search engines happy, and don`t bother to work with copywriters to make a sales pitch that inspires action. As any two-bit SEO will tell you, targeting search phrases for the sake of visibility and traffic volume is only part of the equation: facts, arguments, rhythm, culture, invitations, interaction and conversion make up the rest. The laissez faire attitude has the potential to trickle down into a business`s prospects, no matter how far a copywriter is willing to go to make up missing lengths.

If you are just about to embark on copywriting for your website, take heart. Work closely with well qualified copywriters to communicate the essence of your company online as closely as possible - no matter how many drafts it takes. To do this, you need to be familiar with your business`s online personality, which is connected with your target audience. From looking at the places where you and your audience tend to spend your time online, you can find a “voice” that your business will use. By adding a carefully selected group of target phrases and balancing this with a tailored business pitch, you can achieve direct response copywriting with effective results.

In a time before search engines read content, direct response copywritingwas all that existed - meaning people read content and reacted to it. There was no sticky writing, boiler plate bull and markety obfuscation that a copywriter uses nowadays in lieu of actual company ideas. But I believe the time for laissez faire copywriting - which, let me tell you, is a gamble for everyone involved, not just the client - will be short lived. Search engines are perfecting their grasp on relevance, and I hope that they will factor in “balance” as something that makes a website a leader in its field. Balance in search terms - rather than stuffed with them; balance in facts - rather than clogged with useless words to soak up the top-heavy terms; and balance in external and internal linking - so that there are reasonable calls to action, and useful resources. Nothing about the internet demands a let be/ laissez faire attitude, and copywriting is not an exception.